Carceral Geography Working Group

Carceral geography is defined as geographical engagement with spaces, practices and experiences of confinement and coercive control. Work in carceral geography is rich, diverse and multi-scalar: • It focuses on wider structural, political and institutional contexts, as well as on everyday experiences, practices and agency. • It is sensitive to change and difference across space and time, space/time, and between cultures and jurisdictions. • Empirical focus is often on spaces of ‘mainstream’ incarceration – e.g. prisons or immigrant detention facilities – and the overlaps and synergies between these spaces, their lifespans, and their porosity. • However, it recognises that techniques and technologies of confinement seep out of ‘carceral’ spaces into the everyday, domestic, street, and institutional spaces, including spaces that are typically associated with ‘care’, but which often transmute into sites of coercive control. • It also increasingly recognises ‘the carceral’ as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.